Team and Members’ Contribution to Inventions: Diversity from Individual and Team

Effective team building is widely considered to be an essential factor of research and development. The purpose of this paper is to explore how team profiles and individual profiles affect team performance, respectively. We focus on technological diversities as a vital profile of both teams and individuals. We examine the relationship between diversity and team performance using patent bibliographic data and patent citation analysis on U.S. patents. Our results show that both interpersonal diversity and generalist inclusion affect teams’ inventive performance. From the perspective of team construction, the result indicates that management could flexibly apply interpersonal diversity or generalist inclusion. We hope that our findings could be helpful for team management and human resource in research and development.